She was able to relive the thoughts
and feelings of the authors whose books she studied and so make their
experiences her own. She could reconstitute the emotional life of her
authors and gain potency through the transfusion of spirit. Her books
were living things, and she gleaned life from their pages.
=Reading and life.=--She can teach reading because she can read. Reading
to her is an experience in life. The words on the printed page are not
meaningless hieroglyphics. They are the electric wires which connect the
soul of the author with her own, and through which the current is
continually passing. When she reads Dickens, Tiny Tim is never a mere
boy with a crutch, but he is Tiny Tim, and, as such, neither men nor
angels can supplant him on the printed page. She knows the touch of him
and the voice of him. She laughs with him; she cries with him; she prays
with him; she lives with him. In her teaching she causes Tiny Tim to
stand forth like a cameo to her pupils, with no rival and no peer. This
she can do because he is a part of her life. She has no occasion either
to pose or to rhapsodize. Sincerity is its own explanation and
justification.
=Power of understanding.=--When she reads "Little Boy Blue" she can hear
the sobbing of a heartbroken mother and thus, vicariously, comes to know
the universality of death and sorrow. But she finds faith and hope in
the poem, also, and so can see the sunlight suffusing the clouds of the
mother's grief.
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